🔼The name Beracah: Summary
- Meaning
- Blessing
- Etymology
- From the verb ברך (barak), to kneel or to bless.
🔼The name Beracah in the Bible
The name Beracah is assigned to one man and a valley in the Bible. The man named Beracah is one of the men of war who came to David while in Ziklag (1 Chronicles 12:3). The valley named Beracah, or actually named the Valley Of Beracah, is named in subsequence of Judah's king Jehoshaphat's war again Moab and Ammon.
That war wasn't much of a war, at least not for Judah, because the people of Judah sang worship to the Lord, while Ammon and Moab destroyed first the people of Mount Seir, and then each other. By the time Judah got to the battle field, all enemies were dead. Judah looted the remains for three days and on the fourth day gathered in the Valley of Beracah (2 Chronicles 20:26).
🔼Etymology of the name Beracah
The name Beracah comes from the verb ברך (barak), meaning either to kneel or to bless:
ברך
The verb ברך (barak) mostly means to bless and sometimes to kneel. But the noun ברך (berek) always means knee, and the noun ברכה (beraka) always means blessing. The opposite of to bless is to curse, or ארר ('arar), which literally means to bind or restrict.
That probably means that the act of blessing had to do with the act of giving someone the freedom to do whatever this person had in their heart to do. The freely moving knee, after all, makes it possible to walk and run and go wherever one wants.
The name Beracah is identical to the feminine noun ברכה (beraka), meaning a blessing.
🔼Beracah meaning
For a meaning of the name Beracah, both NOBSE Study Bible Name List and Jones' Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names read Blessing. BDB Theological Dictionary does not translate but notes that our name Beracah is identical to the noun beraka, meaning blessing.